‘Not sure we had that pace’ – Were Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen out of reach for McLaren?

Andrea Stella believes McLaren would not have finished on the podium even without its tyre gamble and reliability issues. The team struggled with the cold conditions in Montreal

While Lando Norris had a front-row seat to the Mercedes battle between George Russell and Kimi Antonelli in the Canadian Grand Prix sprint and eventually finished second, the main race of the Formula 1 weekend painted a very different picture.

Starting from the second row of the grid, McLaren appeared to be in a strong position to challenge Mercedes again, but everything went wrong for the papaya team on Sunday.

“Here in Canada we had issues in pretty much all areas of racing, from the sporting side to reliability and an accident,” Stella admitted after the race. “So there's definitely lots to take away and review.”

The sporting side refers to the decision to start on intermediates, after which the day went from bad to worse due to Oscar Piastri’s collision with Alexander Albon and the gearbox issue that forced Norris to retire.

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Because of those problems, McLaren was unable to get a clear read on its upgrades, the second phase of its Miami package. On Friday, the team decided to temporarily shelve the new front wing and revert to an older spec, while Stella believes the verdict on the other parts is more nuanced.

“I think this sprint event has had two phases. Up until the race today we can say that the car seemed to be performing well,” Stella said. “We seemed to be within a few tenths of a second of Mercedes, still remaining the best car, but probably we have the second-best car now and this was encouraging.”

Andrea Stella, McLaren

Photo by: Ryan Pierse / Getty Images

In the colder conditions on Sunday, when getting the front tyres up to temperature proved a major challenge, McLaren struggled to extract the full potential of the car.

“Independently of the issues with the starting tyres or the other kinds of issues, even when we were in free air, I don't think we exhibited any competitive pace at the level that we had exhibited up until today.”

“I can only point this towards the lack of tyre temperature. The drivers kept locking tyres and going long in corners, and just not getting the front tyres to work at all.”

According to Stella, the MCL40 is more sensitive to those conditions and tyre struggles than its rivals, much like Gabriel Bortoleto has suggested is the case for Audi in the midfield.

As a result, Stella believes that Lewis Hamilton and Max Verstappen would have been out of reach for both McLarens in a straight fight, despite Verstappen struggling with front tyre temperatures during his second stint as well.

“I would say that even in a normal race, in a race in which we had no issues, looking at the pace of the other cars that were contending for the podium, I'm not sure that today we would have had this pace based on the laps that we did when we had the possibility to use the full potential.”

Piastri too eager after strategy mistake?

Alexander Albon, Williams, Oliver Bearman, Haas F1 Team, Oscar Piastri, McLaren

Photo by: James Sutton / LAT Images via Getty Images

Stella believes a points finish would have been the maximum achievable result, following the early switch to slick tyres.

Norris would not have reached the finish regardless because of his gearbox issue, while Piastri pushed too hard in an attempt to recover from the team’s strategic mistake at the start, colliding with Albon.

“In terms of his incident, I think the stewards penalised the incident and this is deserved,” Stella reckoned. “I don't think there's much more to add. It was a misjudgement [from Oscar]. Obviously there must have been some pressure as well to try and recover, but ultimately this was penalised by the stewards and was also penalised by the fact that the car was damaged.”

“Like I said, in hindsight, points would have been possible, but today we didn't have a pace that could have allowed us to recover.”